SAFEGUARDING dominates the agenda for the first three days of the five-day General Synod meeting to be held in London from 10 to 14 February. The business would “help with the journey of improvement that the Church of England is on”, the secretary-general, William Nye, told a press briefing on Thursday.
In response to the Wilkinson (News, 11 December 2023) and Jay (News, 21 February 2024) reports, detailed proposals for a new structural model of organisations to deliver and scrutinise safeguarding on behalf of the Church of England set out two possible models, which will be put to the vote.
In the first, safeguarding officers currently working in dioceses, cathedrals, and the national Church would be transferred to a new organisation. In the second, diocesan and cathedral officers would remain with their current employers, but most national staff would move to a new body. In both scenarios, safeguarding work would be scrutinised by a second external body.
A motion responding to the Makin report (News, 7 November 2024) will be taken on Monday afternoon. A presentation and debate on the proposed new structures is to begin mid-morning on Tuesday and continue into the afternoon if necessary. The Synod will also be asked to approve new safeguarding codes of practice, including guidance on managing allegations; and legislative business on Tuesday is also safeguarding-related, concerning clergy risk assessments.
The lead bishop for safeguarding, the Bishop of Stepney, Dr Joanne Grenfell, said: “Understandably, there is considerable interest in our safeguarding work at the moment, and of course it’s important that General Synod owns this work and makes its own views known.
“In the light of the Makin review in particular, it’s vital that we recognise the pain of all victims and survivors living with a legacy of abuse. Such recognition is needed in the context of both the widespread past failure within the Church to respond well to disclosures of abuse, and, in some instances, of the deliberate cover-up of that abuse.
“We know that victims and survivors have been re-traumatised in recent months as further cases of abuse have been brought to light. . . We have to repent and act for change. I’m sure it will be a frank and challenging debate.”
Living in Love and Faith (LLF) does not come to the Synod until Thursday morning, in the form of a presentation with questions on the current work and progress. The Bishop of Leicester, the Rt Revd Martyn Snow, who is leading the LLF implementation process, reiterated at the briefing that no formal decisions had been made.
A key thread of the Bishops’ discussions had been allowing the Synod to come to the point where it could vote on a complete set of proposals “in what we were calling stand-alone but are now calling bespoke services — but doing that together with the theological underpinning to all of that work”, he said. “And, secondly, to prepare the way for a clear decision to be made about whether it is possible to allow clergy to enter into same-sex civil marriages.”
Concern at the timescale to allow the requisite underpinning theological work meant that proposals would probably now have to come to a later group of sessions (News, 21 January) — something that, he acknowledged, would be “disappointing” to many people.
He said: “I’m very conscious from the conversations I’ve had in the last few days that there are people who are frustrated by that. Nevertheless, I do think it’s important that we do have the requisite theological work such that this decision is something that could be owned by the whole Church.”
A private member’s motion from the Revd Alex Frost (Blackburn) on Wednesday calls for a national strategy supporting the entry of people from a working-class background into ministry (Comment, 26 April 2024).
“I’m hopeful that this could be a good-news, human-story opportunity for the Church,” he said. “We just heard of two very important pieces of work there, but they’re examples of things that have been around for some time, and I’m very keen to present this and and enable it to be moved on quite quickly.
“So, I’m asking for the Church to come up with a strategy within a year from the February Synod. It’s clear that there is a drop in vocations in the Church of England. It’s clear that there’s a very much smaller ratio from working-class backgrounds, such as myself and the parish that I represent here in Burnley. . . I’m hoping this could be a real kind of a positive thing.”
A motion from the Hereford diocesan synod on Friday morning invites the Synod to disperse the income from funds effectively transferred to the Church Commissioners as a result of dioceses’ taking on the cost of clergy pensions in 1997 — a settlement of £2.6 billion — directly and regularly to dioceses and stipend funds, as part of the current- and future-triennium funding agreements.
In doing so, “a future financing system would be achieved which would rebalance the Church’s finances to reverse the widespread degradation currently being experienced by our parishes and the dioceses that support them and that is undermining all our achievement of all the intended outcomes of our Church’s agreed Vision and Strategy,” the background paper says.
It says that the number of dioceses in deficit is increasing: 18 were in deficit in 2019, but at least 35 are expected to be in deficit in 2024 (News, 20 June 2024). The financial crisis of dioceses has also been recognised to be a cause of the low number of vocations to ordained stipendiary ministry, it says. Vocations have fallen by 40 per cent since 2019. Fewer than 350 ordinands began training in 2024, compared with an original aspiration of 650.
On Tuesday, there will be a take-note debate on possible changes to the voting procedures of the Crown Nominations Commission; a presentation affirming the Racial Justice Agenda; and an update on sports and well-being ministry.
On Wednesday, the Synod will undertake the final drafting and final approval of the Clergy Conduct Measure, and, on Thursday, it will debate the continuing work to enable the voice of young adults to “feed into the work of the national church”. The draft National Church Governance Measure reaches its revision stage on Thursday; and there will be a presentation and debate in the evening on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the global prayer initiative Thy Kingdom Come.
Mr Nye acknowledged that, three years into the quinquennium, “business gears up . . . So we now have a very busy agenda indeed. There’s lots of legislation, there’s lots of the Church’s secondary legislation, there are proposals for reform, and a number of areas of serious business. . . It’s all serious in a way, although some is always joyful, and a lot for the members of Synod to engage with.”
This, he reminded the media, would also be an unusual group of sessions, in that just one Archbishop would be presiding (News, 12 November 2024).